Death, Revolution, and Giggles

The political platforms of the left are gradually transformed into scaffolds --Dávila

A few more points about the logic of sacrifice before moving on. First, note the role of projection: for five years the left has been viciously attacking President Trump, and yet, feel themselves to be his victims, for which reason they feel justified in his political murder (the symbolic regicide of impeachment). 

Indeed, Dems such as AOC quite literally feel their lives were threatened by the president and his agents, e.g., Senators Cruz and Hawley. 

Which brings to mind a golden oldie by Schuon that perfectly encrapsulates the mindset of the left's perversive victim culture:

In reality, man has the right to be legitimately traumatized only by monstrosities; [BUT] he who is traumatized by less is himself a monster.

Monsters. Germans, for example, were traumatized by the Jews. They certainly said as much. Nazis fervently maintained that murdering the Jews was an act of pure self-defense. The purpose of this comparison is not to evoke Godwin's law, but rather, to highlight the power and persistence of political psycho-projection. Extreme cases illuminate the less extreme. 

If we've learned nothing else over the past five years, it is the extent to which the contemporary American left "speaks" the language of projection. If they didn't, we would have no way of knowing what they're up to until it's too late. (Hint: eliminating Trump = eliminating us. And U.S.) 

In order to decode who they are and what they believe, one must examine what the left imputes to others, e.g., racism, violence, anti-science, etc.  This has always been the case, but there is something in the psychospirtual water that is accelerating the process, such that the time between projection and enactment is shortening, perhaps because our cultural defense mechanisms have been breached and overwhelmed. Spiritual AIDS.

Acceleration. Toward what? Spiritual death, which is to say death, for death occurs when the form withdraws from the body. 

Yes, you might say that the form of our culture is simply undergoing "change" (AKA "progress"), but a change in substance is the opposite of a change of substance. That is to say, if the change is grounded in our founding principles -- for example, oh, freedom of speech -- then that is consistent with the Life of our nation. 

Conversely, to the extent that change is grounded in substantially different principles, then this is a change of substance into a new organism. It is revolution, not renewal. 

Speaking of which, is there a commandment the left doesn't invert and negate, from idolatry to relativism to envy to the institutionalization of theft?

That was a rhetorical question. For

--What is called the modern mentality is the process of exonerating the deadly sins (NGD).

Accelerate. Where have I heard that? Ah yes -- Fr. Reginald deployed this word just last night, although in a book that was published 75 years ago. In it he traces our cultural descent from paganism through deism, naturalism, liberalism, materialism, atheism, radicalism, socialism, communism, revolution, et al. Change!

However, if 

the most lamentable effects of these pernicious errors do not yet clearly appear in the first generation, they are manifested in the third, fourth, and fifth generations according to the law of acceleration in descent. It is as in the acceleration of falling bodies: if in the first second the velocity of descent were to be twenty, in the fifth second it would be a hundred (emphasis mine).

Now presciently, this was published one year before the appearance of the most Grating Generation, the dreaded Boomers. We are now into, what, the fourth generation since them? (Millennials --> X --> Y --> Z --> whatever.)  If these latter generations are bad, I still blame the parents and grandparents.  

(Speaking of which, new book: Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster -- https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593086759/?coliid=I3EZSR6RZEQ0ED&colid=1M0Z9KRTC1IB&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it)

I don't mean to sound so pissimystic this morning, because I'm not. Rather, I always assume the worst and hope for the best. To quote our friend Nicolás,

With good humor and pessimism it is possible to be neither wrong nor bored.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that our civilization is dead. Rather, that it is visibly dying before our eyes; and that one must be either insensate or one of its attackers or to not see this. After all, the latter no longer even bother to lie about what they're doing, so just believe them. 

Consider what they're doing to our children, which is soul murder masquerading as education:

--By 2022, as your first-grader is learning that two plus two is four, the Minnesota Department of Education intends to mandate that she also learn to recognize “stereotypes,” “biased speech,” and “injustice at the institutional or systemic level.” 

--Your middle schooler will be drilled in how his identity is a function of his skin color.

--Your high schooler will be required to explain how Europeans invented “whiteness” and that America’s 19th-century westward expansion was the shameful product of “whiteness, Christianity and capitalism.” 

--World history from classical Greece and Rome to World Wars I and II... has been virtually eliminated. In its place, for example, young people... will learn about “feng shui”...

--5-year-olds will “identify surface and deep characteristics of different ways of being (identity).” Fourth-graders are coached on how one’s “identity” and “biases influence decisions about how to use a space.” Seventh-graders are exhorted to “define race and ethnicity from different perspectives and make connections to one’s own ways of being (identities).”

--By high school, students must “explain... the social construction of race” and “assess how social policies and economic forces offer privilege or systematic oppressions for racial/ethnic groups.” (https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/02/the-left-wing-plot-to-misinform-our-children.php)

Again: a change of substance. One can advocate this change, but just don't deny that it redounds to the death of one culture and the birth of a new one, good and hard.  

Sometimes I write a whole post without intending to do so. Like today, for what I really wanted to do is wrap up our discussion of Transcendence and History. Let's try to do so in the timelessness remaining. I guess this passage will do:

So -- whether the phenomena under consideration are the cults of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, or more benign discharges such as an obsession with UFOs or the deification of movie or pop music stars -- a naively immanentist or materialist landscape is invariably a field of spiritual disorientation and false adoration, where the human longing for the divine ground is misdirected and misapplied.

And a fistful of aphorisms to wrap things up:

--The conservatism of each era is the counterweight to the stupidity of the day.

--Conservatism should not be a political party but the normal attitude of every decent man.

--To be a conservative is to understand that man is a problem without a human solution.

--The conservative is a simple pathologist. He defines sickness and health. But God is the only therapist.

--To scandalize the leftist, just speak the truth.

--Defeats are never definitive when they are accepted with good humor.

Ha!